


Motherhood

by Elsodex



Category: Once Upon a Time (TV)
Genre: Childbirth, Gen, Motherhood, Prison
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-03-02
Updated: 2013-03-02
Packaged: 2017-12-04 02:09:52
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 1,724
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/705302
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Elsodex/pseuds/Elsodex
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Two companion pieces that take a brief glimpse into the moments when both Emma and Regina became mothers.</p><p>Only a handful of states have laws banning the shackling of women prisoners during labor. Arizona is not one of them. Emma has three days. That's all.</p><p>They say there is a hole in the Evil Queen’s heart. And perhaps there is. But it isn’t where the love for her son resides.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. 72 Hours

She’s in restraints—cuffed to the gurney, steel gnawing into her wrists, when the contractions begin in earnest.

The closest hospital to the jail is twenty minutes out. Comparatively, the ride there isn’t so bad—it’s the wait in the parking lot as they’re turned away by the understaffed and overcrowded facility and the subsequent trip to the next nearest hospital that ends up getting to her.

The ambulance manages to hit every pot hole and speed bump as they go, each jolt an acute reminder of her position, bringing a new layer of meaning to the pain. She thrashes, and the cuffs dig in some more. It seems to take much longer than it actually does to get where they’re going, or so she’ll remember afterwards.

She throws her head back with near neck breaking force when another contraction hits her. They come quicker now, crashing on top of one another. Telling her in no uncertain terms her child is coming into this world, whether she’s ready or not.

The shackles are so tight.

She tries fighting it, tries to push the pain down and away. But it’s useless, there’s no escaping it. So she grits her teeth and grinds her back molars ‘til they ache, fails to listen to the EMT calmly telling her to breathe, when she’d rather be telling him to fuck off.

Until finally—finally—she’s wheeled into a delivery room, shackles and all.

She’s not really aware of the doctor’s shouting as he tells off her guards about things like “stress to the baby” and “mother’s blood pressure”, but she dimly notices when the cuffs are removed.

And then the real work begins.

* * *

_Emma’s Spanish is barely above remedial, but she’s learned what_ embarazada _means, so she knows its common knowledge in the block now. She doesn’t know what’s worst, the fact that Neal managed to knock her up before making her his fall gal, or how the rest of the inmates are treating her now that they know. Emma tells her cellmate as much, switching between incoherent mumbles and incoherent babbling._

_“…I want to die, Araceli.” Big watery unshed tears hang on her eyelashes. She knows she’s being dramatic, but she doesn’t care—she’s pregnant, in prison, and god, she’s only eight-fucking-teen._

_Araceli stops picking at the bits of ash on the palm of her hands, and pins Emma with an exasperated stare reserved for occasions when she’s grown particularly obnoxious and tiresome. Araceli sighs, before impatiently intoning in a course and accented voice, “Pobrecita, un dia se quedaras como una pajarita…which is better than most of us will get. But not this time.”_

_The silence after hangs between them like a sour note, and Emma realizes no translation is forth coming. Shamefaced, she starts contemplating the dust bunny rolling about the cell floor. Araceli isn’t a friend, not really. She’s Emma’s cellie. Nothing more._

_“Ven pa’ca.” Araceli gestures Emma over with a movement so sharp she doesn’t question it. She curls up on her lap, and soon Araceli’s elegant piano-hands are sifting through Emma’s blond curls._

_“Setenta y dos.”_

_“What?”_

_“That’s how long you’ll have with your baby. Seventy-two hours. After that…”_

_Emma could finish the rest herself. “She goes in the foster system.”_ No. _“I won’t let that happen.”_

_“Hm. What choice do you have?”_

* * *

He’s in her arms, slick with afterbirth. It should be wondrous—her heart bursting forth with pride, dreams of the future—all those things the catalogues and books tell you. And maybe that’s what this is—the feeling in Emma’s gut as it twists up in sharp pangs, like she’s digesting needles.

She’s never been needed. But here she is, her arms wrapped around this tiny, vulnerable miniature person, who needs her. And maybe, in another time, another world, she’d could be that person (in every way). But here and now…?

Here and now it’s not a decision she’ll have to make, because, somewhere, a clock is ticking.

Seventy-two hours.

All the time she has—all the time she’ll ever have to get to know her son.

God. _Her son._

In the first hour the nurse helps get her started breastfeeding. She can’t believe how tiny he is. Not unhealthily, just…small.

They take him away in the second hour, so they can both rest.

In the seventh hour she names him Alec. From the Carroll books she’s practically memorized after reading them to him, so many times over.

In the twenty-ninth hour they notice a slight yellowing in his skin and they have to take him away again to place him under white light. It’s during this time the adoption lawyer appears out of nowhere. She doesn’t question it nearly as much as she should, doesn’t ask this mysterious man the question that should be on her lips before he even has a chance to introduce himself: “Why me?” not when the inevitable answer is, “why does it matter?”

In the thirty-sixth hour they bring her son back and she feeds him again, rocks him against her breast. She thinks then, given the chance, that maybe, just maybe, she could be ready for this. But then her mind wanders back to memories of a childhood filled with heartache and broken dreams and she wonders just what she could offer that would be any better.

In the forty-second hour the lawyer returns with the paperwork despite her never having agreed to anything.

Desperation sweetens even the sourest of Faustian bargains, but in the sixty-eighth hour she’s still undecided. And every minute now is precious. She hums to her boy a bit desperately as he cries, unsure of what else to do. Her guard just glares at her. She manages to calm him down an hour later, and as he sleeps she makes her choice, such as it is.

In the seventy-first hour, the papers are signed. A closed adoption. That was the price. But if it means keeping her beautiful boy out of a life she knows all too well—shunted from family to so-called family—she’ll pay it. She’s only known him for three days, but she can at least give him that.

It’s the seventy-second hour and their time is up. Emma’s lips linger on her son’s forehead as she kisses him one last time, whispering in his ear even as she hands him away:

“…I have to give you your best chance.”


	2. All the Pretty Little Horses

There are, of course, numerous books in this world on the subject. Literature from men who have sequestered themselves in academies and declared themselves experts on children and motherhood, bonding and attachment. It’s all very strange to Regina. In her kingdom, in her reality, adoption wasn’t some formalized institution—it simply was. War orphans, foundlings, inheritance and bequeathment of succession—all matters which were rather cut and dry.

Here, there are laws and documents to sign, in and out of state arrangements to consider, so on and so forth. Regina approaches it all with care, spending the better part of a decade just researching. She chiefly concerns herself with the legalities, but makes a passing effort to trudge through the less insipid guides to parenting as well.

Regina reconsiders the whole affair in the twelfth year of the curse, realizing that any child she’d bring into her life would have to come from the outside. Would grow and mature while the rest of their world stood still, and there are lies even she can’t weave.

But when the small creature is actually in her arms, and Gold at last has left, it’s all she can do to stop herself from hyperventilating.

She isn’t ready.

She isn’t ready, and she’s doubting herself in ways she never has before. Questioning her abilities like she hasn’t for decades—not since her mother’s _lessons_. It’s a reminder of what’s at stake, the battle she will wage daily as the child grows, to not make the same mistakes _she_ did.

Suddenly, those parenting books are looking far less tiresome.

Regina hesitantly runs a finger down the side of the baby’s cheek. He gurgles and kicks and she stiffens like a deer on the double yellow line at midnight. But then he stretches upwards and small grasping digits reach out blindly, catching on the scar above her lip, and Regina relaxes again.

Regina’s voice cracks as the words slip without beckoning, she’s sure she can’t remember all the lyrics, but she doesn’t think the child will notice.

“Hush-a-by, don’t you cry, go to sleep little baby…”

They were the words her father sung to her, memories of a more innocent time, now lost, when he called her _alteza_ and _mi corazon_. Regina cradles the child closer to her as he starts to fuss, realizing then she’ll never call him that. It’s too…fraught. Too laden with memories, conjuring up images she would rather forget. Of fingers sinking into her father’s chest, the still beating heart pulsing in her hand as she rips past sinew and tears away the last of her familial ties. Or of a lost and helpless look on the face of a man who now comes to her simply because he doesn’t know any better.

“When you wake, you shall have…all the pretty little horses…”

Visions of an army— _her army_ —consumed by a wall of crystal white snow. Hundreds of more than just horses, left buried beneath the avalanche where they fell.

Her curse now ensures that the “boy” responsible is suffering sufficiently.

“Paints and bays, dapples and grays…”

Regina remembers. Remembers the face of a beautiful boy with chocolate ringlets, and shining eyes, as she offers him his every desire if he can but retrieve something from a blind old witch’s cottage—who never returns. She looks down into the still-shut eyes of babe in her arms. He frets then stills, settling into a peaceful slumber nestled safe in her arms.

Henry. Henry is what she names him.

Henry won’t share that nameless child’s fate, nor that of her father. She won’t allow it. A truth as binding and unbreakable as one of Rumpelstiltskin’s deals. She knows it, to the very core of her half-rotted out heart. She'll protect him to her dying breath.

_“…All the pretty little horses…”_

Regina drops the softest of whisper soft kisses on Henry, _her son’s_ , forehead—and smiles.


End file.
